Computer data is vital to today's organizations and a significant part of protection against disasters is focused on data protection. As the cost of solid-state memory has decreased, organizations may be able to afford systems that store and process terabytes of data.
Conventional data protection systems may include tape backup drives, for storing organizational production site data on a periodic basis. Another conventional data protection system uses data replication, by generating a copy of production site data of an organization on a secondary backup storage system, and updating the backup with changes. The backup storage system may be situated in the same physical location as the production storage system, or in a physically remote location. Data replication systems generally operate either at the application level, at the file system level, or at the data block level.
Most of the modern storage arrays provide snapshot capabilities. These snapshots allow a user to save or freeze an image of a volume or set of volumes at some point-in-time and to restore this image when needed.